"My Fair Lady" on Broadway at Lincoln Center

Last week TD and I went up to Lincoln Center to the Vivian Beaumont Theater to see My Fair Lady and it was a big treat. It runs almost three hours and I enjoyed every minute of it. My Fair Lady stars Lauren Ambrose (below) as the transformed flower girl Eliza Doolittle, Harry Hadden-Paton from Downton Abbey as Professor Higgins, Diana Rigg, who I remember as Emma Peal on The Avengers tv show (!) as Professor Higgins' mother, and Norbert Leo Butz as Eliza's father. 

(photos from the Lincoln Center website)
Lauren Ambrose, best known from Six Feet Under, was famously cast to star in Funny Girl on Broadway but that production was canceled for lack of funding. Now she has her chance on Broadway and she is wonderful. She is of course a great actor plus she can sing too!
     The real revelation was Norbert Leo Butz who is a two-time Tony Award winner, but I had not seen him on stage before. He is magnetic and you can't take your eyes off of him. The rip-roaring number "Get Me to the Church on Time" (below) had people clapping in their seats and stopped the show with thunderous applause.

Mr. Harry Hadden-Paton as Professor Higgins was a no-show which was initially disappointing but we saw a tall and handsome understudy named Tony Roach who did a great job and thoroughly inhabited the role. This production is elegantly directly by Bartlett Sher. We saw his production of The Light in the Piazza, also at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and that too was a memorable play.
     My Fair Lady has the most wonderful set piece, which is Professor Higgins' Edwardian London house. On stage it dimly advances forward out of the darkness and lights up. Then it spins around to reveal different rooms - the library, the front hall, a bathroom or hall. Characters go through doors of the rooms as it spins and then it recedes back into the darkness at the end of a scene. It was beautiful how it was done, somehow evoking its own emotion.
     And of course there is the swelling Lerner & Loewe music thanks to a full orchestra playing away. It's one hit after another - "Wouldn't It be Loverly," "With a Little Bit of Luck," "The Rain in Spain," On the Street Where You Live."
    I was so happy to see this production because I have a long history with My Fair Lady. When I was young, the movie came out over Thanksgiving weekend, which is when my birthday falls so for my birthday I wanted to go see My Fair Lady. I was seven.
    We were visiting my grandparents in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and my mother and my grandmother and brother Thom and I took the "high speed" train into Philadelphia and saw the picture in a grand old theater that I'm sure is no longer there. I, of course, loved it all - directed by George Cukor, costume design and art direction by Cecil Beaton, and starring the stunning Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. The movie images have become iconic.
Eliza at Ascot –

Eliza at the Embassy Ball –

After seeing the movie we got the soundtrack record and I listened to it at home every day after school, oh yes I did.

When my family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, while I was in college, I was home working one summer and volunteered to do props for a production of My Fair Lady presented at the Fort Wayne Civic Theater. There were some cast parties and it was a fun way to make some friends, and after hearing the show every night I grew to know it by heart. For me My Fair Lady is a beautiful, lyrical Edwardian dream. What a long-lasting gift its creators gave.

A Musical Week in New York in Three Acts

Sunday in the Park with George at the Hudson Theater. This photo from The New York Times.
Before the sad event described in my previous post, TD and I had a wonderful week in New York when we attended three delightful musical events within seven days.
One: First up was the Broadway production of Sunday in the Park with George at the Hudson Theater, which was a joy. This musical by genius Stephen Sondheim is about Impressionist painter George Seurat and how he produced his pointillist masterpiece painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which can now be found at the Art Institute of Chicago. What a pleasure it would be to see this painting in person –

When I met TD...that would be 32 years ago...he took me promptly to see Sunday in the Park on Broadway with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin, and I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. This new production (which has now completed its run) featured movie star Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford.
Here is the charming cast collecting money for Equity Fights AIDS after the show –

Jake Gyllenhaal is a wonderful actor, and he brought the rough personality of Seurat alive. And I was particularly taken with Annaleigh Ashford who I thought was sexier and more lively than Bernadette Peters. The show is really about the commitment to creating art and the price it can take on one's personal life. It's breathtaking visually and the music is gorgeous. This is not a new notion, but in creating a show about making art, Stephen Sondheim himself produced a masterpiece.

Two: Later that weekend, we headed up to East 128th Street in Harlem to a gala at the Music and Mentoring House hosted by acclaimed opera soprano Laura Flanigan. Laura lives in the oldest nineteenth-century wood frame house in Harlem and it's a beauty –

In the house, Laura offers educational programs for singers, mentoring for artists, professional introductions, and a place for artists to train for auditions. At the fundraising gala on a bright spring day, guests sat in the living room as student artists performed to a piano accompanist while sun streamed in through the tall windows of the old house. Laura also offers Saturday Soirees in her garden where guests can meet and hear the students.
Afterwards we all walked to a nearby Italian restaurant in Harlem called Barawine for food, wine and more music. On the way, our friend Philip pointed out the gigantic home where actor Neil Patrick Harris and his husband and children live. As if on cue, Neil Patrick Harris passed us on the sidewalk with a big smile.
At the restaurant, as we ate pasta and salad and sipped red wine, Laura Flanigan herself sang some songs by Rufus Wainwright –

Outside, the sun cast its last rays on Harlem's beautiful brownstone row houses. It really was a lovely Sunday afternoon.

Three: The following week we were invited to a gala for the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown which is one of our favorite destinations upstate. This annual gala in New York City raises money for the Glimmerglass Festival Young Artists and Summer Internship Programs. Like Lauren Flanigan's Music and Mentoring House, this program helps young artists in opera get to the next stage in their careers. This summer, the 110 Glimmerglass apprenticeships will offer emerging artists, craftspeople, production and artistic personnel valuable working experience and guidance.
The event, which we have attended before, is held at the gorgeous Edwardian-style Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue, which was completed in 1894. After cocktails in the Grand Hall –

guests progressed into the red and gold gilded salon room to hear performances by some of the young talents who will be singing in Cooperstown this summer. 
The Festival's dynamic Artistic and General Director Francesca  Zambello welcomed the crowd –

(Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival)
Charismatic director and choreographer Paige Hernandez performed a bit of her Stomping Ground, a Glimmerglass-commissioned hip-hopera that will have its world premier at this summer's Festival –

(Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival)
Youth Opera Artists Richard Pittsinger and the Sparklers - that is Emma Hullar, Catie LeCours and Aria Maholchic - sang some of Wilde Tales, which weaves together fairy tales by Oscar Wilde and will have its debut in the barn theater at Glimmerglass this summer – 

(Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival)
It's a great treat to sit in the intimate salon and listen to the artists sing. Several more performances promised an exciting season ahead. If you are near Cooperstown this summer, check out Glimmerglass!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season. I have had an unusual season this year – super busy at my new job at Ralph Lauren, and also very preoccupied with getting my father ready to move to Colorado, which I wrote about on the blog previously. So my attention has been elsewhere and the holiday season has literally flown by, but TD and I have enjoyed some wonderful parties and entertainments here in New York City.
Last weekend we at last got our Christmas tree up (above). We got it from our friend Billy Romp on Jane Street who has supplied our tree since 1988.
For my birthday, which is at the end of November, we went to see Pippin on Broadway!
(photo from Pippin web site)

When I was in high school, I went to see the traveling version of Pippin in Utica at the Stanley Theater. I took a girl. Later we went to the junior prom. Let's just say I enjoyed Pippin more! This production on Broadway is directed by Diane Paulus, who was the genius behind the recent Broadway production of Hair, and it features gymnasts and acrobats in a circus setting. It was so colorful and entertaining. We sat in the first row in the balcony. I had great time.
My photo of the curtain call –

On TD's birthday, which comes one week later, we had a delicious lunch at Union Square Cafe –

Up at Bergdorf Goodman, the theme of the holiday windows is the arts. This glittering one is based on music –

They do such a fantastic job with their windows. This one is inspired by film. It looks like a Greta Garbo silent movie –

Down Fifth Avenue, TD enjoyed viewing the big tree at Rockefeller Center –

We went to see the Matisse cut-outs at the Museum of Modern Art. I love these Christmas colors –

My mother had a cousin named Bondie O'Donnell, and he has a daughter named Julia who has a daughter Uma who is 14 years old and is studying here in New York City at the School of American Ballet. She's a real ballerina! I think Uma and I are second cousins once removed. Anyway, TD and I took Uma to see George Balanchine's The Nutcracker at the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. (photos from the web site)

It was so beautiful. I had seen it years ago but really had not remembered how ornate and gorgeous it is.

Here we are at intermission, O'Donnell second cousins once removed.

Today is Christmas Eve. We are going tonight to my brother Eric's in Montclair for a family dinner. There we will say good-bye to my father who is moving to Colorado on Friday.
This is a picture of the two of us a few years ago at a wedding –

I will miss him a lot.
And I am wishing you all the best for the holidays and the new year, dear reader. 

A Trip to Broadway for The Glass Menagerie

Cherry Jones, Zachary Quinto, Celia Keenan-Bloger and Brian J. Smith make up the cast of the memory play The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Photos from The Glass Menagerie website.
Last Saturday morning was snowy and grey, and I said to TD, "I would love to go see The Glass Menagerie." I had never before seen Tennessee Williams' masterpiece. The play first came to Broadway in 1945 when Williams was only 34 years old, and established him as a great new American playwright. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, as the main character, Tom Wingfield, remembers life with his mother and sister and a visit by a gentleman caller in the family's St. Louis apartment long ago. The current production on Broadway at the Booth Theater had garnered great reviews and was soon to close so it had been on my mind as something that I did not want to miss.

At home, we went online to the TKTS website and saw that the play was listed that very day for half price tickets. We quickly got dressed and rushed out the door and took the subway up to Times Square, hoping the tickets would not be sold out. After an anxious wait in the line we reached the ticket window and scored two half price tickets for the matinee performance.

We had a little time to kill so we walked to Angus on West 44th Street, a favorite restaurant in Times Square, for lunch and sat in the bar area where we had a Croque Mademoiselle and a glass of white wine. Suffiently fortified, we headed around the corner to the Booth Theater, which is a great old Broadway Theater, and settled into our cozy, plush seats.

It was indeed a beautiful memory play. The minimal set depicting the family apartment was arranged in pools of black shadows, and the lighting would dim when a character was remembering a story and going back in time. The cast was amazing – including strong, brilliant Cherry Jones as the bossy mother Amanda Wingfield, and Zachary Quinto, previously known to movie goers as Doctor Spock in the Star Trek movies, who was a revelation as the tortured Tom. He delivered a powerful performance in elegant, reserved moves. Of course the real star was the Tennessee Williams language and writing and storytelling – so poetic and lyrical and elegiac. The set and the performances and the writing fused together to create one of those memorable productions that stays with you long after. I was so grateful to see it with my Valentine. 

The play ended, there was a standing ovation, the lights came up, and they opened up the doors at the back of the theater. It was snowing so we bundled up in our big coats and left that dark cocoon of art and memory and went out into the white snow on Broadway.

A Little Night Music

Bernadette Peters and Alexander Hanson play lovers with bad timing.

Last week TD and I went with our friend Mark to see A Little Night Music on Broadway, the luminous show set in Sweden at the the turn of the last century, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler. You probably know that Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won a Tony in the role, and the great Angela Lansbury were recently replaced by Broadway legends Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters.


Bernadette Peters plays Desiree Armfeldt, an actress on the European stage with a unsuccessful love life, and Elaine Stritch plays her mother, Madame Armfeldt, who has regrets of her own. Stephen Sondheim music, nineteenth century costumes, and Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters – what's not to love? TD and I also saw the New York City Opera version in 2003 starring Jeremy Irons who cut a very elegant line indeed as Frederik Egerman.

You won't believe this but I worked backstage on a production of A Little Night Music in high school. In Utica, New York, the Munson Williams Proctor Institute art museum held a summer arts festival and mounted musicals under a big tent on Genesee Street. I volunteered on A little Night Music, and loved the complexity and sophistication of the show. However, on the two nights it was presented, rain poured down and pounded on the tent; I don't think the audience heard one single word.

The music in the show is wonderful, and it's one pleasure after another, including "You Must Meet My Wife," "Liasons," "Every Day a Little Death," and "A Weekend in the Country." In the second act, Desiree sings the show's renowned song, "Send in the Clowns." This is what The New York Times said recently: "For theater lovers there can be no greater pleasure than to witness Bernadette Peters perform the show's signature number with an emotional transparency and musical delicacy that turns this song into an occasion of transporting artistry...[it's] an indelible moment in the history of musical theater."

That's a lot of pressure, with a build up like that! Everyone in the audience was waiting for that moment. I'm happy to say that with tears in her eyes she does indeed really pull it off; I had never before her performance fully understood the heartbreaking situation that this character is in. The audience applauded deeply with approval, almost before the song ended, like at the opera.

I adore Elaine Stritch who is now 84 years old, and her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, at the Public Theater was one of the best nights ever in the theater. No one is funnier on stage, but to me the character of Madame Armfeldt is enigmatic and inscrutable, a mysterious link to ancient Europe shrouded in veils with her memories of "the castle of the king of the Belgians."

Madame does tell a poignant story at the end of the show though about rejecting a suitor in her youth because he gave her a wooden ring. "He could have been the love of my life," she says with longing.
I also have to remark that the set was extremely simple, nonexistent really. TD said that in the 1973 Broadway original, the Tony-nominated sets were ornate and they actually rolled an antique car on stage. Those were the days. Now Broadway tickets get more expensive and the sets get simpler. TD also noticed that it was a not a full orchestra but a pared down one.
But these are economic issues. I think it's safe to say that A Little Night Music is an American masterpiece. The supporting cast was excellent, especially Leigh Ann Larkin as the lusty maid Petra who sings a showstopping "The Miller's Son," and Erin Davie as the dryly sardonic Countess Malcolm. The production is a joy of music and romance and waltzing twists and turns. When the cast takes their bows in their creamy summer Edwardian linens, it's an elegant celebration of American artistry

and two great ladies of the theater.

It's a Broadway kiss.

Blog bonus: I found this video on Playbill.com, which offers some moments from the show.

La Cage Aux Folles!

TD and I recently went with our friend Mark to La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway. I was excited to see it because I never saw the original which was up on Broadway in the eighties or the 2004 revival. The original was a big glitzy production and TD said it was in a huge Broadway theater. This scaled down version is more realistic and intimate. In June it won three Tony awards, including best revival of a musical.

La Cage Aux Folles is based on the 1973 French play of the same name, later adapted into a French movie and the American movie The Bird Cage. The Broadway production has music and lyrics by Jerry Herman and a book by Harvey Fierstein. Years ago my friend Abby and I went to see Torch Song Trilogy, written by and starring Harvey Fierstein. After the show we ran into him in a restaurant, and he said to me, in his gravely voice, "You have a nice nose."
Anyhoo, La Cage is about a gay couple, Georges, the manager of a Saint Tropez drag night club and his partner Albin, the drag queen star of the club. The night club features performances by Les Cagelles, the fanastically talented drag dancers. Conflict kicks in when the couple's engaged son wants Albin to leave their home during a visit by his fiancee's ultra-conservative parents.
Georges is played by Kelsey Grammar of Frasier and Cheers fame. He's a wonderful actor and a wonderful singer.

And Albin is played by Douglas Hodge. Who was kind of breathtaking.

Douglas Hodge is a classical actor who is English, married, and has two children. Albin is flamboyant, emotional, funny, dramatic. But the parts that mesmerized me were when he was being quiet, hurt, moved. With a whisper and a sigh and a flutter of a wrist and a tilt of his head he held the entire theater in the palm of his hand. Such a gift. Douglas Hodge won a Tony for this performance in June.

Just before the show started, guess who came streaking down the aisle to take seats across from us in the fifth row? Sarah Jessica Parker, her husband Matthew Broderick, and the guy from Bravo TV, Andy Cohen. Sarah Jessica was wearing a long sparkly cardigan and tank top and skinny jeans. Hair in a top knot. When Obama was running for president, TD and I attended a fund raiser hosted by Anna Wintour and Sarah Jessica Parker who spoke eloquently and impressively about her political beliefs. In the theater, her arrival caused a subtle stir in the neighboring audience. Well, it's always good to have celebrities in your midst.

This production's dancing and music and costumes are colorfully entertaining. At the heart of the show though really is a very tender love story between a long time couple who are devoted to each other.

The actors really pulled it off very movingly. It's a universal story, and every body can relate to it. Anyone would enjoy this show. Certainly, SJP was enjoying it, smiling up at the stage with her chin resting on her folded hands. I think if you were a performer on stage it would be quite a treat to have Sarah Jessica Parker beaming up at you. Did you know that from 1977 to 1981 she starred in the Broadway cast of Annie, written by our friend Tom Meehan. That girl can really sing. I wish SJP would do a Broadway musical.

By the curtain call the entire audience was up on its feet clapping. It reminded me of our experience at the end of Hairspray (Harvey Fierstein was in that too) and Hair, when the cast is singing and clapping at the edge of the stage and the audience is standing and clapping – there is at that point no division between the two, it's one happy, uplifting, exuberant Broadway experience.

The City Celebrates Sondheim

The great American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim turned 80 earlier this spring, and New York City has been celebrating. Sondheim is of course the genius behind Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, and Follies, to name a few of his highest achievements. He certainly is one of the greatest living American artists, and what a great joy it must be for him to be acclaimed like this.

Earlier in the season the New York Philharmonic marked the occasion with a concert starring, among others, Patti LuPone, Elaine Stritch, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters and Audra McDonald. I know – amazing.

Right now, Bergdorf Goodman is paying tribute to the man with windows inspired by his music. An edgy military jacket and silver sequin jeans by Chistophe Decarnin for Balmain are positioned near a Sweeney Todd barber chair

and a beautiful black and white gown by Carolina Herrera is at home amongst graphic black ink drawings by the great Al Hirshfeld who died in 2003.


This week TD and I went to see Sondheim on Sondheim, now on Broadway at The Roundabout Theater which used to be Studio 54 back in the day. It's a biographical anthology of Sondheim's songs, conceived and directed by James Lapine who brilliantly directed Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway. This show includes a cast of six including Tom Wolpat (who TD chats with at our gym), Vanessa Williams, who is coming off her wonderful turn as the villainous Wilhelmina Slater in the much-missed Ugly Betty, and the great Broadway treasure Barbara Cook who this year is 83.

(two photographs from The New York Times)
The songs on stage are interspersed with video of clips of Sondheim talking about his life and work played out on plasma screens. You really do learn a lot about the man.


Stephen Sondheim grew up on the upper west side in New York City. After his parents divorced when he was ten, he and his mother moved to Pennsylvania. Luckily a nearby neighbor was the legendary lyricist and playwright Oscar Hammerstein who took the boy in as a surrogate father. Sondheim adored Hammerstein and wanted to be just like him. "If Oscar was a geologist I probably would have become a geologist," Sondheim says via video in this show. Luckily he became the most brilliant composer of his age.

Sondheim's relationship with his mother was not as happy. He says that when he was forty and his mother was going to have heart surgery, she sent him a note which said that the only regret she had in her life was giving birth to him.

The audience gasped when he says this. You know, you never know what people go through in life. He said, "Thank God for Oscar or I might not be alive today." At another point this man who famously wrote about love and affairs of the heart says his first love relationship came along when he was sixty.

His work is wonderfully celebrated here. TD and I both thought the first act was a little flat but the second act took off with those powerful, emotional songs that bring tears to the eyes including "Sunday in the Park with George" which visually shows how a work of art comes together, "In Buddy's Eyes" which celebrates love between a couple as they get older, and "Not a Day Goes By" about a love lost but not forgotten.

When I met Ted on Labor Day on Fire Island in 1985, he introduced me to the work of Stephen Sondheim and took me soon after to see Sunday in the Park on Broadway. He had already seen it and wanted to take me. That show, about the process of the creation of art, was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. We went again to see the revival recently in this very same Roundabout Theater. I love Sondheim but Ted does even more so and has been to Chicago and Washington D.C. to see productions. We laugh: He says, "Do you want to go see the new Follies?" and I say, "No Ted I've seen Follies three times" and he says, "But you haven't seen this Follies."

But Ted really did bring all these beautiful songs to me. When I hear Stephen Sondheim, I think of Ted.

Hair!

TD and I recently went to see Hair on Broadway. I'm telling you, go see it if you can.

This revival of the 60s musical was staged last summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. This year in March it moved to Broadway. We had heard good things about it from last summer, and the number that was presented at the Tonys in June on tv (pictured above) was sensational. That night Hair won the Tony for best revival of a musical, beating out Arthur Laurents' re-staging of West Side Story. I decided we should high-tail it up to the box office for tickets.

Hair was first presented off-Broadway in 1967 at the Public Theater run by Joe Papp, and moved to Broadway in 1968. The rock musical told the story of a band of anti-war hippies and included plenty of sex and drugs which was very controversial at the time. It was the precursor to later rock musicals of the era like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.

The colorful production up now at the Al Hirshfield Theater is infused with irresistible joy. The cast has the most tremendous energy, spinning and dancing around the stage like whirling dervishes in choreography created by Karole Armitage. The show eliminates the line between the stage and the audience so the cast is in the theater a lot dancing in the aisles and on the seats. I love the clothes from this era and the hippie costumes are an inspiration. The music is great, and of course there is all that long glorious hair waving around.

I had a long hair moment. I always wanted long hair or a pony tail for a Martha's-Vineyard-hippie/Irish poet sort of look so I did grow my hair long for a while. One day I was at the gym and a woman approached me. She said that her husband was a photographer and they were shooting pictures for stock houses. She told me that there was a demand for guys with grey hair and they would pay me to model for a session. She thought I could sign up with an agency. I didn't pursue that but I did do one shoot with them. Here is a picture:

Eventually I cut my hair shorter and shorter. Someone said to me cut your hair shorter so you look younger on job interviews. Oh dear. That's not why I cut my hair, but I suppose you have to be about eighteen, or live in 1968, to pull off a pony tail.

At the end of the Broadway show the cast invites the audience up on to the stage to dance and sing to a reprise of "Hair." Everyone was on their feet for a thrilling curtain call (click on my photo to enlarge).

TD was speechless, and he's seen a lot of Broadway shows.
Let the sun shine.